Wither Natami?

[bloodline]

ral-clan wrote:

 Emulation is great, but for doing MIDI work where timing is everything, running straight on native hardware just can't be beat.

I'll buy the first clone that can reliable meet or exceed the capabilities of my old A2000/040/32MB RAM.

MIDI is VERY sloppy, the cheapest new PC you can buy would easily run WinUAE and any MIDI software you have perfectly... I know because I've been doing that for 8 years...

[bloodline]

weirdami wrote:
@bloodline

I know because I've been doing that for 8 years...

being sloppy?  :-P

I've been sloppy a lot longer than 8 year :-D

[bloodline]

ral-clan wrote:
I'm not sure what you mean exactly when you state that "MIDI is sloppy".  Do you mean that MIDI is a very loose format, so it doesn't matter what you run it on?  Or are you saying that MIDI under Amiga Emulation on a PC is so sloppy in timing that it's crap?

What MIDI software are you running in UAE on the PC?  How is the timing via the MIDI port?  What sort of PC MIDI interface are you using (game port?  USB) that works with Amiga emulation?

I want to be able to run Bars & Pipes and OctaMED, mainly, as good as they run on a real Amiga.

Just as an aside.  Can you run Amiga MIDI apps under emulation and have them run in sync with PC multi-tracking apps?  i.e. use Bars & Pipes in UAE and have ProTools running on the PC side, and have the two sync up?

MIDI is very low frequency, and has serious lag in long MIDI chains... so it will work find even on quite bad emulation.

I used a MIDI loopback so I could use OctaMED in WinUAE an loop it back into Various soft synths I had running in Windows.

It's quite easy and fun to do, have a go :-)

[bloodline]

utri007 wrote:
Some people just want to do it with real amiga ;)emulation is great thing but it's not like real thing.

Natami, CloneA and MiniMig are not real amigas...

[bloodline]

TheDaddy wrote:
>>Natami, CloneA and MiniMig are not real amigas...

And who says so?

Anyone with a clue?

[bloodline]

TheDaddy wrote:
>>In the case of both MiniMig and Natami, their creators do (I've never heard of CloneA).

That doesn't mean it can not be considered a real Amiga.

What is a real Amiga?

Is a real Amiga anything that has an Amiga name printed on it?

Is a real Amiga anything that bears the Commodore name on it?

Is a real Amiga any portable device that says Amiga on it?

Is an Amiga a device powered by just the Amiga OS?

Would you call a pc an Amiga if it was running Amiga OS?

If Commodore were still around (not bust and etc.) and they released the Minimig or the Natami under the Amiga 550 and Amiga 7000 names and they didn't tell you these new machines were using FPGA, would we still be here discussing it they are REAL Amigas or not?

If Amiga Inc. had licensed the name to the Minimig and Natami creators what would you call them?

Nonsense.

Amiga Hardware is hardware based on the designs of the Original Amiga chipset.

The FPGA projects are new circuit designs which look to software like the Original Amiga chips... In much the same way as an Emulator looks like Amiga Hardware to Amiga Software.

-Edit- CloneA would be the closest to the real Amiga chips since that actually try to get the Amiga Chip timing right as well, and thus would look like Amiga Hardware to other Amiga hardware.

[bloodline]

TheDaddy wrote:
>>Amiga Hardware is hardware based on the designs of the Original Amiga chipset.
The FPGA projects are new circuit designs which look to software like the Original Amiga chips... In much the same way as an Emulator looks like Amiga Hardware to Amiga Software.

So what?
It's the year 2005 Commodore are still around and they are planning a small, Amiga 500/600 compatible machine with PS/2, SD-Card, VGA support and they name it the Amiga 550.

It is released using fpga technology because it makes economic sense.

So we have the Amiga 550 (Minimig) by Commodore. Is this a "real" Amiga?

How is it any different to running UAE?

[bloodline]

mikej wrote:
"By no definition I know of (given their respective creators words on the matter if nothing else), could these two projects be called "real" amigas, since everything is being done by an emulator coded into an fpga."

It's not really an "emulator" in the sense of UAE at least, which is software running a close approximation to the original hardware on another cpu. The FPGA designs are actually copies of the original hardware.An FPGA is a big bunch of gates which have the same function as the original chips in the Amiga. The firmware wires these up to create hardware which could be identical to the original design (assuming no bugs). Electrically, in theory, you couldn't tell the difference between the original Amiga and a perfect FPGA copy - it would be the same design.

Sometimes when we design custom chips nowadays we take the source design that will be made into the chip and run it up on a really big FPGA to find any problems before we make it. The FPGA and the custom chip are the same design - ok, the FPGA is a lot more expensive and runs slower. Technology has moved forward so much since the Amiga was made we can now put all the original hardware in a modern FPGA and run it much faster and add extra features. It will be possible to run the 68000 softcore much faster than the original, how fast I don't know yet, but 50MHz plus should be no problem.

No one has the original chip designs anymore, so the FPGA Amigas are workalikes, they do not behave exactly as the original chips.

[bloodline]

TheDaddy wrote:
>>FPGA Amigas are workalikes, they do not behave exactly as the original chips.

I would say that they can be an improvement of the original chipset. I would even go further and say an evolution.

UAE is an evolution too... Cheaper, more compatible and more configurable.

[bloodline]

TheDaddy wrote:
This discussion takes me back to the old "Is Amithlon/Amiga OS XL/WinUAE an Amiga?" and my favourite "What makes an Amiga?"

 :-)

Hmmm... yes, maybe.

But on a serious note, and what I was trying to get across to the OP, was that Emulation will work fine for his needs.

[bloodline]

mikej wrote:
"No one has the original chip designs anymore, so the FPGA Amigas are workalikes, they do not behave exactly as the original chips. "

True, but they will be much closer than a software emulation. It is possible to get exact behaviour by running the FPGA core against a real custom and looking for any differences. This is what I've been doing with the Atari chips and will do for the Amiga customs. In this way you can prove the chips behave identically to the originals for all the stuff you have tried, demos, games etc.

If somebody wants to throw money at the problem it is very possible to reverse engineer the logic by examination of a real chip - you scan the chip, strip off the metal layer and repeat. These chips are old so the feature size is large, but it's still expensive.

But, you are right, software emulation is good enough for most things.
/Mike

Ok, I guess you are unaware of the projects...

MiniMig just looks like Amiga for software, that's how Dennis made it. He made no effort to recreate the chips, only to get the software to work.

NetAmi, hasn't been finished and the project developers are not looking for cycle accuracy here... so that will be similar to MiniMig.

CloneA, was built to be cycle accurate. Logic Analyzers were used to to ensure that the FPGAs not only perform the same function but timing is perfect too. This is the closest we will ever get to the Original Amiga. But the DACs are not the same old 80s tech, so the gfx and audio output will be different, subtly...

WinUAE is by far the most accurate and configurable Amiga recreation possible. I can adjust all the settings to match any of my real Amigas. I have software that will work on one model of Amiga and not on another... UAE will run all the software...

[bloodline]

mikej wrote:
I am aware of the on-going work, and I agree UAE is accurate and configurable.
Personally I want an expandable hardware system which is accurate enough to run the software I wish to. True, the FPGA designs will be approximations to the original hardware, but with effort they can be extremely close. Logic analysis helps, but it only verifies what you capture. By running the two chips in lock step you can verify function and timing.

The CloneA Aims for this, and as such is the most accurate of the Hardware clones. If Jens ever finishes it, I'll get one :-)

The Atari custom chips I have been working on are gate level accurate. (I am an ASIC designer by trade).

Forgive me, but the Atari chips were quite a bit simpler than the Amiga ones.

At the end of the day, I think expandability is more important that complete compatibility, it's sort of fun to add hardware features we all wished were there from the start. Ok, you can do this in the software emulator, but it's a bit more real when it's a small board sitting on your desk?

If I want expandability then I'm going software. If I buy a piece of hardware it has to be able to replace my real A1200, one for one (but offer VGA out, and PS/2 or USB ports, etc).

[bloodline]

amiga_3k wrote:

bloodline wrote:


Hmmm... yes, maybe.

But on a serious note, and what I was trying to get across to the OP, was that Emulation will work fine for his needs.

I have tried OctaMED on WinUAE (moderate 2.4 GHz PIV on Windows XP) in different configurations and it never ever felt about the same as when running OctaMED on a 25 MHz 68040 equipped A3000. So WinUAE to me doesn't quite do the job. Which brings back an old question I had: How is OctaMED behaving on the MiniMIG?

I agree, I also had problems with with a 3.0Ghz Pentium4 (I think that had a weird timers as I would always get stuttering)... but my Athlons and MacBook Pros always worked fine :-)

[bloodline]

JimS wrote:

the_leander wrote:

By no definition I know of (given their respective creators words on the matter if nothing else), could these two projects be called "real" amigas, since everything is being done by an emulator coded into an fpga.

You need to understand what an FPGA is before you say something like that. It's basically a huge pile of chips on solderless breadboards with a huge pile of wires to make the interconnects. The design software lets you specify how those chips are interconnected. Nothing is "emulated" unless you build a cpu on the FPGA and do emulation with it. (The port of   Minimig to the Altera DE1/2 boards does this for the PIC processor - replacing it with a soft Z80.

The best comparison I can think of is that the minimig, and it's cousins are like the Amiga Lorraine prototype- where the custom silicon was implemented with hard wired low level gates.... It's just that the FPGA makes that process faster & smaller.

If the reimplementations in the FPGA were gate level accurate, to the Original Chips, I would agree.

But they are not.

[bloodline]

JimS wrote:

bloodline wrote:
If the reimplementations in the FPGA were gate level accurate, to the Original Chips, I would agree.

But they are not.

The accuracy of the reimplementation in the FPGA doesn't have anything to do with whether the minimig & friends should be called "emulators" or "clones", "reimplementations" or what have you. It's the technology being used that I'm quibbling about.

Ok fine. We can call it Brian if you like :-) But that doesn't make Hardware clone of an Amiga more or less accurate than Software clone of a Amiga. Some people get confused by that simple point.